Apollo's computer: Ran in 2 KiB memory! Miniaturized design before microprocessors became widely available! Rope memory for the ROM hand-woven by weaver ladies! Multitasking operating system kernel! Margaret Hamilton coined the term, and practice, of "software engineering" to develop the software for it! Houston had to debug it from the ground!
Artemis's computer: [theme from Curb Your Enthusiasm plays]
For me it's cities—large, empty cities with little, if any, foot or vehicular traffic. Typically in the US or Australia and laid out accordingly, so not like Kowloon Walled City. But it's almost as if they're that way because my brain's "GPU" cannot render that many people or cars moving about. Sonetimes in these dreams I'm able to "teleport" to an interior location where there are people, and I'm fine.
Of course, it may be influenced by the fact that I spent ~15 years in the Boston area, and while New York is the city that never sleeps, Boston can get hauntingly empty late at night, or even on Sunday afternoon when most everything's closed...
For a great Kowloon-influenced atmospheric game, check out Stray.
I work in banking. We provide modern solutions for small local banks in the US. That's how our core runs. It's just Java apps (Spring Boot, Jakarta EE) running in the cloud.
It's all ha-ha until you realize that some versions of Dartmouth BASIC actually had matrix operation primitives, and so might've been a good choice for implementing GPU-accelerated linear algebra kernels. (It was also compiled; Microsoft basically established BASIC's reputation as a slow language by shipping an interpreter-only version for the Altair and later machines. As usual, Microsoft gonna Microsoft.)
Given that the go-to linear-algebra libraries for the past N decades (BLAS, Linpack, etc.) are Fortran, I'd suspect that neural-network people would be rather okay with it, esp. if it could be driven with a Python wrapper (which is how most people use BLAS and Linpack today).
BASIC is roughly to Fortran what Rust is to C++: its creators set out to design a "better Fortran", and realized that the limitations and complexities necessitated creating a whole new language.
The truth is not as strong as I had claimed. BASIC's expressions kinda resemble Fortran's, probably because that was what was lying around. It seems that an easier version of an existing language is what Kurtz wanted, but Kemeny was more interested in starting from scratch, which view Kurtz came around to. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_BASIC):
When the topic of a simple language began to be considered seriously, Kemeny immediately suggested writing a new one. Kurtz was more interested in a cut-down version of FORTRAN or ALGOL.[14] But these languages had so many idiosyncrasies that Kurtz came to agree with Kemeny:
If we had corrected FORTRAN's ugly features, we would not have FORTRAN anymore. I reluctantly had to agree with John that, yes, a new language was needed.[15]
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